Comments on: Trying MonoDevelop On OS X

By: Trying MonoDevelop On OS X, Part Two | The Inquisitive Coder – Davy Brion's Blog

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 10:35:06 +0000

[...] played around with MonoDevelop 2.2 beta 1 on OS X a while ago. Back then i considered it promising, yet unusable due to the fact that writing and editing [...]

By: Lalli

Lalli — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:04:58 +0000

I had exactly the same text editor freezing problem with my MacBook Pro, but after restarting the MonoDevelop, everything is fine. The preferences menu was also freezing. The problem existed only at the first start of MonoDevelop.

MonoDevelop 2.2 Beta (2.1.1)
Mono 2.4.2.3

By: Brian Agnew

Brian Agnew — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:43:57 +0000

I suffered the same problem. However, I then turned off syntax highlighting, code folding, and code completion. The problem went away (as I suspected). I then turned each of the above back on (in different orders) to identify what caused it. I am now back to having everything enabled, and it runs much faster than before.

Perhaps I’ve missed something, but I believe I now have it back to the default state but with acceptable performance. Perhaps it’s worth playing around again with this.

By: Gabriele

Gabriele — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:25:54 +0000

The 2.2 beta 1 build did indeed have the incredibly slow response in the text editor, I just tried the latest trunk build of MonoDevelop from http://monodevelop.com/Download/Trunk_Builds and this seems much more usable at first glance. I’ve only been using it for a couple of minutes however, so I may be back shortly to correct myself.

By: Shawn Neal

Shawn Neal — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:37:14 +0000

A few months back I tried the latest trunk version on Ubuntu and it was not a pleasant experience either. It kind of worked, but was not better than a regular text editor for numerous reasons: debugging not working, NUnit not working, intellisense not working. That and the fact that the mono compiler kept crapping out trying to build MonoRail wasn’t pleasant either. At some point I’ll try it again on an official release.

By: John Bubriski

John Bubriski — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:14:10 +0000

@RCE: I’m not making any complaints… I’m not sure what you mean by “I think it’s that attitude that has the potential to wreck a lot of OSS projects”… If anything, it can fuel them. .NET applications can now be easily ported to other platforms! If you’re a .NET developer who writes open source software, your audience has now multiplied because your code can be run on Macs and Linux machines.

And I was joking about the complaints. I’m sure they are aware of the major shortcomings of the IDE as of today. Seeing as they are developing an IDE to write C# code, I’m sure they’ve all used Visual Studio, which is a pretty good IDE.

Maybe you didn’t understand, but I LOVE the IDE of being able to run my code on any machine. The only reason I program in .NET is because it’s such a joy.

By: Reflective Perspective - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #434

Reflective Perspective - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #434 — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:13:00 +0000

[...] Trying MonoDevelop On OS X – Davy Brion dips a toe into the world of cross platform .NET Development exploring the MonoDevelop IDE running on OS X [...]

By: RCE

RCE — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:29:39 +0000

@John: I think it’s that attitude that has the potential to wreck a lot of OSS projects. You should make (valid) complains, otherwise the program/library/kitchen sink won’t improve.

By: WayneB

WayneB — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:11:15 +0000

Too bad you can’t use this kit without buying specialty hardware from a boutique shop.

By: John Bubriski

John Bubriski — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:12:29 +0000

I was skeptical at first, but considering how quickly the Mono team (Miguel de Icaza) is implementing features (I think they are almost caught up to .NET 3.5), I have faith that they will make this editor work well.

What good is a language without a half decent IDE??? In any case, you could develop all your code in windows, and then just compile it using Mono right? So you never really need to use a Mac

Also, as RCE mentioned, they are also working on MonoTouch, the API thingy for iPhone development using .NET code. Is it going to be perfect? Of course not! But hey, it’s free so don’t complain

By: steinjak

steinjak — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:13:37 +0000

I’ve tried the same on Linux (it’s supposed to work fine on lnx, right?), but I ran into the same problems as you (unusable editor). It seems we’ll have to continue carring our work-laptops around whenever we want to write C# code for fun/at home (or go back to the best editor of them all (emacs!) and use old-fashioned Makefiles/build scripts).

By: RCE

RCE — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:23:45 +0000

Den Ben: I think the iPhone option is probably for this.

By: Benny Michielsen

Benny Michielsen — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:34:33 +0000

You could use http://www.monobjc.net/ to create a native UI for OS X and link it to you mono/.net code. Haven’t tried it out yet.

By: Davy Brion

Davy Brion — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:22:23 +0000

Learning Cocoa/Objective C actually isn’t that hard… it’s a pretty clean language, and the Cocoa frameworks are very nice

By: den Ben

den Ben — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:19:52 +0000

Hmmz… looks to me that it will still take quite a long time before this ever will become usable; if it even will at all.

As for the iPhone option: I call that very wishfull thinking

I guess for us .net developers there is (and probably never will be) no cheap shot trick for developing OS X applications. If we want it, we’ll have to climb the steep Cocoa/Objective C route.